Recording - November 2013 - 52

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even to open up a director’s mind. It’s just lame
to have sort of a watered-down version if you
can’t get the band Jet. You know… just to do a
“Do You Want to Be My Girl” rip-off, there’s no
value there. So, like Julie did with the [TAXI
members] “The Love Me Nots’” song, they originally had White Stripes, but she expanded the
palate a little bit to include a female vocal, and
the song still kicks ass, but in a different way, and
they didn’t have to rip off the White Stripes and
have anybody do a Jack White imitation.
Do you ever get something handed to you, and you
just can’t make it work from a music editor’s
perspective?
Julie: I recently worked on show where the
[video] editors did some of the worst music editing I’ve ever heard. They would just pull different
parts of songs, and they would edit the picture
without regard to the music. Sometimes, when I
would get the music back, it would be all different
pieces of a song. So, in that case, you either do the
best you can with it, or you go to the producer
and you say, “You know what? This really doesn’t
make sense, and I don’t think the integrity of the
song is being held up here. So how about if we do
it like this?” And so they do look to me to fix
things and make them work better.
What can you do when you’re stuck with a horrible
music edit?
Julie: Well, there’s a mixer’s trick, which is,
you put a car driving by, or a door slam—something over it and you can kind of hide it. But
then there are other little technical things you
can do. You can expand a beat; you can squeeze
a beat. Because a lot of times what they’ll do is
they’ll get the beginning how they want it, and
they get the ending how they want it, and they
don’t care what happened in the middle, they
just want the music editor to fix it. So
sometimes they’ll let you slide it one way or
another, but they really get hooked on “the vocal
comes up right there at the end,” and they really
don’t want to lose that. So you do some things
that you wouldn’t normally do, but, hopefully,
you smooth it over so people don’t notice it.
Kevin, as part of TAXI’s A&R team [and now as V.P.
of A&R/Film/TV], you get very hands-on with our
members’ music. Can you tell the audience what
metadata is, and why it’s important for them to do
it, and get it right?
Kevin: It’s basically the tagging of the song
once you put it into the digital realm. It includes
song titles, the artist’s name, genre; things like
contact information. And it’s not always is a
standard format. Everybody would think it’s
pretty straightforward, but we do get a lot of
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material that we forward to companies, and it’s
missing certain elements that can really get in
the way and blow a deal for somebody—especially in the TV world where things happen at an
extremely fast pace.
If you don’t have an artist’s name [in the digital
file], you don’t know who to contact to license
it. And if you’ve got five other songs waiting
in the wings, and that song, even though it’s
the best one for that opportunity, is out the
window. So it’s definitely important. A lot of
people will send in songs with fragmented
titles that say things like, Rough Mix 1. Just
stick to the song’s title, the artist’s name, and
contact information at the very least, so when
we get it into our system, we have everything
we need to work with.
Just yesterday a friend of mine called me… I
was at a conference, and they gave me a memory stick of the new catalog they represent. So
they called and asked, “Did you listen to that
thing?” And I said, “No, but it’s right here.”
She said, “Can you tell me, is there metadata
on those WAV files?” So I popped it in, and
there wasn’t any metadata. It was just the
song title, everything else was blank.”
“Darn!” Another supervisor told her that she

“I think that in TV, the creative
people want indie artists. I think
they’re interested in being the first to
use certain types of music.”
—Julie Glaze Houlihan
refused to even listen to it and pop it in her
computer until it’s redone and sent back with
all the metadata. She doesn’t even want to
listen. So it’s not thrown out the window. It
never gets in the window because it didn’t
have good metadata on it!
Julie: There are some supervisors who feel
very strongly about that. I’ve been on panels…
and I’ve heard people say that if they put it in
there and you can’t read the information all
the way across or there’s no information, they
won’t bother even listening.
You don’t know when you’re going to use the
song. I have this happen all the time. Even
CDs, they don’t sticker it when they send it to
you. They might send a letter, but I can guarantee you we are not keeping your letter. The
letter is going right in the trash. Put it right
on the CD or right in the metadata, because
we can’t keep up with all that stuff. I see people that put it on the disc, but then you shove

the CD in the player and you have to pull it
back out again to see the track list or the contact
info. So put it on the CD and on the sleeve or the
tray card both!
John: I’m not the best myself at opening mail
and packages. It always gets stacked up, and I
have to deal with a very large volume of it. And
we have three boys, and the older two boys I
hire for illegal wages to help me open mail.
When I taught them the very first time, I said,
“OK, you rip it open here and here. And all that
paper and those four-color pictures, just take
that and put it in the trash, and let’s look at
what kind of music it is on the CD, and let’s
make a pile.”
I heard some oohs and aahs from the audience on
that. Tell everybody why you don’t have time to
read their life story and look at the color pictures.
[laughter]
John: You know what I’d like, though? I’d like
to read their life story on the Internet. You
know, if I’m listening to something and linking
through, and someone has a page and there are
pictures, and maybe even a video… That’s sort of
the scanning. But it doesn’t stack well. It’s just
simple practicality. The papers don’t stack well
and don’t add that much value. My director’s
not gonna know or care about the backstory of
the artist. All that matters is, does that song
work in that scene? All that matters is the music.
Patrick, from the movie studio executive perspective, how important is to know that song is going
to clear? And is it dangerous to work with independent artists, because they may not have their
business act together?
Patrick: Well, one of my functions, certainly, is
I have to oversee all the business affairs of the
music. And the lawyers in our department won’t
let us move forward with anything unless they
know it’s rock-solid. If there’s any question, any
doubts, any gray area, they just make us pull
stuff out. So the more the concise the information is up front, it’s easier to sort of get through
the pipeline and get finished and get done and
have it land in a film. So it’s pretty important to
have it all up front and ready to go.
Julie: I would add to that, if you own the entire
song—the master and the publishing—go
ahead and put that on there: one-stop
clearance. People like that. Sometimes we might
not know it was a cover. If it’s a young supervisor, especially, they don’t know every song from
the ’60s or ’70s. Make sure you identify what’s
clearable and what’s a cover.

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Recording - November 2013

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